Black and white photo of a woman wearing a rib-print top, with a small black lightning bolt tattoo on her forearm and a partly visible tattoo on her upper arm.

Lightning bolt tattoo on the arm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a woman's torso, cropped below the chin, wearing a top printed with a skeletal rib cage. A solid black lightning bolt tattoo sits on one forearm, and a partly visible design with fine detail is on the opposite upper arm, with faint script on the lower forearm. The image is high contrast and evenly lit, with the framing centred on the ribcage print.

Forearm Upper arm Lightning bolt Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the stove and mind the kettle, because the sea is not finished with us yet. My father built boats in Scarrow Cove, and the last one he ever framed was the Marigold Anne, all oak ribs steamed and bent over a trestle, twenty-two of them, each one curving like a held breath. The town said she would never float with that many bones showing. He laughed and said a boat is only a skeleton that has learned to be patient.

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The August storm came up the Channel on a Tuesday. The shed doors banged all night and the gulls went quiet, which is the thing you learn to fear first. At dawn my brother Tom found the Marigold standing in her cradle with a black scorch running from stem to keel, a straight jagged line like someone had drawn it with a burnt stick. The lightning had walked down the unstepped mast, found the nearest iron, and gone through the timbers without splitting a single rib.

Nobody could explain it. The vicar said God had a sense of humour. Father only traced the scorch with his thumb and said the bolt had wanted to see what held the boat together, and then it had decided she was worth keeping. He sent Tom for the lamp oil and a bottle of ink, and he inked that same jagged line onto his own forearm, so he would never forget that the storm had looked at her and let her be.

She sailed the next spring, and she never once took on water. I still have the ribs, cut from the wreck when we broke her up in my old age, and every one of them still carries that little black mark where the sky touched her and went on its way.